Top Hackers of All Times

Source : http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-of-the-worlds-most-famous-hackers-what-happened-to-them/

Jonathan James

Jonathan James was known as “c0mrade” on the Internet. What is his ticket to fame? He was convicted and sent to prison for hacking in the United States–all while he was still a minor. At only fifteen years of age, he managed to hack into a number of networks, including those belonging to Bell South, Miami-Dade, the U.S. Department of Defense, and NASA.

Yes, James hacked into NASA’s network and downloaded enough source code to learn how the International Space Station worked. The total value of the downloaded assets equaled $1.7 million. To add insult to injury, NASA had to shut down their network for three whole weeks while they investigated the breach, which cost them $41,000.

The story of James has a tragic ending, however. In 2007, a number of high profile companies fell victim to a massive wave of malicious network attacks. Even though James denied any involvement, he was suspected and investigated. In 2008, James committed suicide, believing he would be convicted of crimes that he did not commit.

Kevin Mitnick

Kevin Mitnick’s journey as a computer hacker has been so interesting and compelling that the U.S. Department of Justice called him the “most wanted computer criminal in U.S. history.” His story is so wild that it was the basis for two featured films.

What did he do? After serving a year in prison for hacking into the Digital Equipment Corporation’s network, he was let out for 3 years of supervised release. Near the end of that period, however, he fled and went on a 2.5-year hacking spree that involved breaching the national defense warning system and stealing corporate secrets.

Mitnick was eventually caught and convicted, ending with a 5-year prison sentence. After serving those years fully, he became a consultant and public speaker for computer security. He now runs Mitnick Security Consulting, LLC.

Albert Gonzalez

Albert Gonzalez paved his way to Internet fame when he collected over 170 million credit card and ATM card numbers over a period of 2 years. Yep. That’s equal to a little over halfthe population of the United States.

Gonzalez started off as the leader of a hacker group known as ShadowCrew. This group would go on to steal 1.5 million credit card numbers and sell them online for profit. ShadowCrew also fabricated fraudulent passports, health insurance cards, and birth certificates for identity theft crimes totaling $4.3 million stolen.

The big bucks wouldn’t come until later, when Gonzalez hacked into the databases of TJX Companies and Heartland Payment Systems for their stored credit card numbers. In 2010, Gonzalez was sentenced to prison for 20 years (2 sentences of 20 years to be served out simultaneously).

Kevin Poulsen

Kevin Poulsen, also known as “Dark Dante,” gained his fifteen minutes of fame by utilizing his intricate knowledge of telephone systems. At one point, he hacked a radio station’s phone lines and fixed himself as the winning caller, earning him a brand new Porsche. According to media, he was called the “Hannibal Lecter of computer crime.”

He then earned his way onto the FBI’s wanted list when he hacked into federal systems and stole wiretap information. Funny enough, he was later captured in a supermarket and sentenced to 51 months in prison, as well paying $56,000 in restitution.

Like Kevin Mitnick, Poulsen changed his ways after being released from prison. He began working as a journalist and is now a senior editor for Wired News. At one point, he even helped law enforcement to identify 744 sex offenders on MySpace.

Gary McKinnon

Gary McKinnon was known by his Internet handle, “Solo.” Using that name, he coordinated what would become the largest military computer hack of all time. The allegations are that he, over a 13-month period from February 2001 to March 2002, illegally gained access to 97 computers belonging to the U.S. Armed Forces and NASA.

McKinnon claimed that he was only searching for information related to free energy suppression and UFO activity cover-ups. But according to U.S. authorities, he deleted a number of critical files, rendering over 300 computers inoperable and resulting in over $700,000 in damages.

Being of Scottish descent and operating out of the United Kingdom, McKinnon was able to dodge the American government for a time. As of today, he continues to fight against extradition to the United States.

Now, do you know any famous hackers who should be in this hall of infamy? Put his (or her) name down in the comments.

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Top Ten Myths About Coca-Cola (Which Just Happen To Be True)

If any company exists long enough, they’re inevitably going to inspire rumors and innuendo that they may not be proud of. However, some companies, like Coca-Cola, seem to attract those stories more than others. If corporations were truly people, as Mitt Romney insisted they were, they would all gather round in a bar, and listen to Mr. Coke regale all the wild, yet shockingly true, tales told about him. Such as …




Inspired by 11points.com

10. The Cola Wars Went To Space

In 1985, NASA approached Coca-Cola about taking their signature project into space. When Pepsi-Co learned about this, they quickly approached NASA about having their product on the same trip. NASA acquiesced, and the experiment was officially dubbed the Carbonated Beverage Dispenser Evaluation Payload.

Unfortunately, the experiment ended up being dubbed a failure by the Challenger crew. The primary reason was, that the drinks appeared to be improperly refrigerated, and did not react well to the pressures of microgravity. At the very least, the astronauts were safe from what Marvin the Martian would have dubbed “an Earth-shattering ka-boom.”

9. Food Network Has A Coke-Based Barbecue Sauce Recipe

Steve Raichlen, author The Barbecue Bible and the Barbecue Bible Sauces, has included a barbecue sauce recipe on the Food Network website that includes just a pinch of Coca Cola. Interestingly, there is no other substitute for Coke listed on the recipe. It is also not recommended to use Diet Coke, Coke Zero, or any other lighter Coke variants. So the next time you get an inspiration, a pig and a poke could easily turn into a pig and a coke.

8. Coke And Beer Helps Give Color Back To Your Lawn

There is a curious “lawn tonic” recipe, designed to make your grass turn from brown to green. At the very least, there are people in western New York that swear by it. Again, the anti-Diet-Coke bigots have reared their ugly heads, and only advise using the real stuff.

The “tonic” is a mixture of common lawn ingredients, as well as beer and soda. It almost makes you wonder how someone came up with this particular recipe. On pure speculation, we’re assuming someone forgot to clean up hangover vomit, and the grass just happened to grow greener on that spot. We can’t back up that theory at all; any of you wild college kids want to give it a test run, be our guest.

7. Coke Deepens Your Tan

Can you imagine our simplistic silliness? All of this time we have been using Coke for the frivolous purpose of drinking it. Apparently, if you are going to spend some time on the Jersey Shore, there exists a more substantive purpose for your beverage of choice. Namely, mix Coca-Cola (again, avoid the diet) with baby oil, and spray liberally-yet-evenly over your body, for a deeper tan. At the very least, you can give mosquitoes a sugary buzz as they drink off of you. After all, aren’t we truly here to help out nature’s creatures?

6. The Coke / Mentos Geyser

Making a Coke geyser might actually be one of the few times you would willingly choose Diet Coke over Coca-Cola Classic. A 2006 episode of Mythbusters showed that Diet Coke would effectively release the carbon dioxide in the Mentos tablets. The resulting chemical reaction gives off a geyser-type effect of Coke out of the bottle. Maybe the reason for using Diet Coke, is because the Classic stuff might just be too precious. It is not determined who exactly came up with this one, but it’s likely the same guy that gave the world “whippets,” and was convinced that Poprocks and Coke killed Mikey.

5. Coke On The Dance Floor

In order to avoid sliding around while filming dance scenes, crews will mop the floor with Coca-Cola. The dried Coke causes the floor to get sticky, and the dancers don’t slide. Apparently, this is done on stage, as well as screen. Honestly, this is kinda like finding out cereal commercials use glue instead of milk, and the actors eat off a top layer.

There are few confirmed sources on whether someone was specifically assigned to clean off all the sticky, disgusting shoes later, so we’re just going to assume that of course there was.

4. Coca-Cola Started Out With Cocaine As An Ingredient

The exact amount is unknown, however Coca-Cola contained at least trace amounts of cocaine until 1903. They weren’t necessarily being evil; cocaine wasn’t banned until 1914. Coca-Cola still uses coca leaves actually, just ones with the cocaine already extracted.

After the cocaine was removed, Coca-Cola stopped being advertised as a curative drug, and began to be marketed as a refreshing beverage. Of course, the exact formula to Coca-Cola is a highly-guarded secret, unknown outside of the company. For all we know, it contains the same secret ingredient found in Krabby Patties. Although, considering the way all of Bikini Bottom lusts over those things, they’re probably laced with cocaine themselves.

3. The 1936 Nazi Olympics, Sponsored By Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola: the official soft drink of Santa, cocaine, and … Nazis? Yes, if you were at the 1936 Olympics, and hoping to have a nice refreshing drink while visualizing a thousand years of blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan dominance, then Coke was your official sponsor. Large corporations are often sponsors of athletic events, though the general feeling is that it’s best to do it in countries that actually win wars. However, not everyone can predict such things.

2. The Coca-Cola Curves Poster

In the mid-1980s, Coke was trying to launch an ad campaign for the return of its original glass bottle. The campaign was called “Feel the Curves.” In South Australia, they had to have a total recall of the posters involved, due to a joke done by the graphic artist hired to do the poster. One of the ice cubes features a coke silhouette of a woman performing an *ahem* graphic sexual act. The image was only caught after the posters were released. It cost Coca-Cola $200,000 to recall and reprint the posters, the offending artist lost his job, and the Internet had an instant legend ready to go, for the day it was eventually created.

1. Coke’s Cola War With Israel

Until 1966, Coca-Cola was not sold in Israel. Coke stated that they had tried to open a bottling plant in Israel in 1949, but that the country was too small of a market to open a franchise. However, Cyprus was a tenth the size of Israel, and supported a franchise. When it was discovered that Coca-Cola seemed to be boycotting Israel, Coke did a prompt about-face.

Problem: there was an existing Arab boycott of Israel. Coke’s decision meant that Coke was no longer served in Arab countries, essentially giving Pepsi the market. Pepsi then claimed that Coke was dominating the soft drink marker in Israel, which meant that Pepsi was not sold in Israel until the 1990s. However, Pepsi was never cited in the United States for participating in a boycott.

In essence, for certain parts of the world, the Cola Wars were a Holy War as well. Today, Coke and Pepsi are both sold throughout the Middle East, including Arabian countries and Israel, marking syrupy carbonated sugar water as literally the only thing that region can agree on.

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Best Android Games

1. Angry Birds

The amazingly popular iOS game moved to Android a while ago, earning over two million downloads during its first weekend of availability.

The Android version is free, unlike the Apple release, with maker Rovio opting to stick a few adverts on it rather than charge an upfront fee. The result is a massive and very challenging physics puzzler that's incredibly polished and professional. For free. It defies all the laws of modern retail.

Angry Birds for Android was first available to download from app store GetJar but is now available through Google Play.

2. Bebbled

Bebbled is your standard gem-shuffling thing, only presented in a professional style you wouldn't be surprised to see running on something featuring a Nintendo badge with an asking price of £19.99.

You only drop gems on other gems to nuke larger groups of the same colour, but with ever-tightening demands for score combos and scenes that require you to rotate your phone to flip the play field on its head, Bebbledsoon morphs into an incredibly complex challenge.

3. Red Stone

There's an awful lot of square-shuffling games on Android and Red Stoneis one of the best. And one of the hardest. You start off with a big fat 'King' square that's four times of the normal 'pawn' squares, then set about shuffling things so the fat King can get through to an exit at the top of the screen.

It's hard to accurately describe a puzzle game in the written word, but seriously, it's a good game.

4. Newton

Released in beta form, Newton is a maths/physics challenge that has you lining up shots at a target - but having to contend with the laws of nature, in the form of pushers, pullers, benders (no laughing), mirrors and traps, all deflecting your shot from its target.

The developer is still adding levels to it at the moment, so one day Newtonmight be finished and might cost money. But for now it's free and a great indie creation.

5. Angry Birds Star Wars

The Angry physics phenomenon took a turn for the weird late in 2012, with Rovio acquiring the rights to blend Star Wars characters with its popular Angry Birds play mechanics. Angry Birds Star Wars is actually pretty nice, with players using Star Wars weaponry to smash down scenery alongside the usual destructive physics action. Not the car crash IP clash we were expecting.

6. Drop

Some might call Drop a game, others might classify it as a tech demo that illustrates the accuracy of the Android platform's accelerometer, thanks to how playing it simply involves tilting your phone while making a little bouncy ball falls between gaps in the platforms. Either way it'll amuse you for a while and inform you of the accuracy of your accelerometer - a win-win situation.

7. Frozen Bubble

Another key theme of the independent Android gaming scene is (ports of) clones of popular titles. Like Frozen Bubble, which is based around the ancient and many-times-copied concept of firing gems up a screen to make little groups of similarly coloured clusters. That's what you do. You've probably done it a million times before, so if it's your thing get this downloaded.

8. Replica Island

Replica Island is an extremely polished platform game that pulls off the shock result of being very playable on an Android trackball. The heavy momentum of the character means you're only switching direction with the ball or d-pad, letting you whizz about the levels with ease. Then there's jumping, bottom-bouncing, collecting and all the other usual platform formalities.

9. Gem Miner

In Gem Miner you are a sort of mole character that likes to dig things out of the ground. But that's not important. The game itself has you micro-managing the raw materials you find, upgrading your digging powers and buying bigger and better tools and maps. Looks great, plays well on Android's limited button array. Go on, suck the very life out of the planet.

10. ConnecToo

Another coloured-square-based puzzle game, only ConnecToo has you joining them up. Link red to red, then blue to blue - then see if you've left a pathway through to link yellow to yellow. You probably haven't, so delete it all and try again.

A brilliantly simple concept. ConnecToo used to be a paid-for game, but was recently switched to an ad-supported model - meaning it now costs you £0.00.

Source : TechRadar

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The 51 Best* Magazines Ever

1. Esquire

Under Harold T.P. Hayes (1961–1973)Esquire had the men's magazine formula backward. An uncommon example of a magazine that sold out first before establishing itself as a literary force, Esquire was launched in 1933 as an early juggs-and-journalism rag (illustrated of course, not photographed), but its most important period began in 1961. Under the leadership of new editor Hayes, the magazine's pages got bigger, future celebrities Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe ushered in New Journal-ism, and design titan George Lois produced the most iconic magazine covers ever. Esquire captured last century's most dynamic decade, visually and literarily altering the way Americans thought about their changing country. Sonny Liston as black Santa Claus? The unsuccessful quest to interview Sinatra? Anti-Vietnam-War Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian? We rest our case.

2. The New Yorker

A rare cultural touchstone both relevant and revered nearly a century after its inception in 1925, The New Yorker has remained a beacon of intellectual clarity and incisive reporting to over-educated bourgeoisie far beyond the borders of Manhattan. With a design that has changed only imperceptibly over the decades (except for earth-shattering changes under mid-1990s editor Tina Brown,who allowed-gasp!-color and-the horror!-photographs), all that's different at the magazine are the stories it covers. The New Yorker today is just as willing to publish a barely illustrated, three-part, 30,000-word jeremiad on climate change as founding editor Harold Ross was happy to devote an entire issue to one article on the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. This is not to mention the fiction, humor, poetry, criticism, and cartoons-all parts of a consistently brilliant editorial vision.

3. Life

(1936–1972)Before cable TV and the internet, there was Life. Publishing giant Henry Luce (Life, Fortune, Time) helped fuel Americans' natural curiosity by turning a then-failing general-interest magazine into a glossy weekly with 50 pages of pictures (by photographers such as Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White) and captions (written precisely to fit in neatly justified blocks) in every issue. For 36 years, Life showed us the world-for pennies a week.

4. Playboy

It would be tough to overstate the greatness of a magazine that had Marilyn Monroe as its first centerfold, and Kerouac, Steinbeck, and Wodehouse on call by its fifth anniversary. Launched in 1953 by the grotto-dwelling, robe-wearing Playboy himself, by the 1960s its table of contents was a veritable who's-who of the best writers of the day and their most compelling subjects. While the magazine has lost its footing as the culturally relevant read for men, its signature "Playboy Interviews" still deliver the kind of no-holds-barred ranting and raving that made it famous. All that, and we haven't even mentioned the naked girls.

5. The New York Times Magazine

Since Sept. 6, 1896, The New York Times Magazine has without fanfare done what it does best: publish smart, populist stories that no one else will touch. Never sold on newsstands, it is to this day perfectly positioned to uphold a sacred but troubled tenet of the journalist's code: reporting news that matters to the world, instead of news that matters to circulation managers and newsstand consultants. This same freedom spills over to the design-minimalist, original, and completely refreshing.

6. Mad

Post comic book, before the death of founder William Gaines (1955–1992)Mad was the skeptical wise guy. Ever ready to pounce on the illogical, hypocritical, self-serious and ludicrous, it was also essentially celebratory: to accurately parody something, you ultimately have to love it. Mad transposed onto the printed page the anarchic humor of the Marx Brothers and Looney Tunes, parodying comics, radio serials, movies, advertising, and the entire range of American pop culture. Nowadays, it's part of the oxygen we breathe; and Mel Brooks, Saturday Night Live, and The Simpsons would be unthinkable without it.

7. Spy

Until it was sold to fun-sponge Jean Pigozzi (1986–1991)With the exception of knock- knock jokes, most of what you find funny today probably came from these pages. In typical Spy fashion, that might not be exactly true, but it's certainly close enough, and the well-informed post-ironic humor behind everything from The Daily Show to Gawker owes more than a little debt to Spy and its founding editors Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter (see intro; 31). The design was pitch-perfect, the stories of office hijinks are publishing-world legends, and its impact on the landscape of American culture is immeasurable.

8. Wired

Early years until Condé Nast buyout (1993–1998)Pages oozing with retina-burning inks and startling layouts broadcast a vision of the future that was both utopian and tangible. Wired was able to bridge the cultural divide between geeks and the rest of us because they saw that in our democratic digital tomorrow, we were all geeks. They let us in on the secret that technology wasn't news, but how it affected our lives was. But Condé Nast giveth (see 2; 31; 45) and Condé Nast taketh away: Its 1998 purchase gradually sapped the infectious energy that so characterized Wired's early years. Still, it's rare to find something as perfect to its cultural moment; both a mirror and a lens, a tribute and a battle hymn. What's next, indeed.

9. Andy Warhol's Interview

Until Warhol's death (1969–1988)When an era's biggest celebrity/artist/pop-culture icon decides to start a magazine about celebrities, art, and pop culture (though mostly celebrities), it's bound to be interesting-if all you care about is interviews with famous people and their pretty pictures, that is. It turned out Warhol was onto something, as he often was, and even way ahead of the curve. Should you be tracing the origins of our present celebrity worshiping culture, this isn't a bad place to start.

Source : http://www.good.is/posts/the-51-best-magazines-ever/

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Lets talk about some influential Heavy Metal Bands. My personal favourites.

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